1. What is the Teashed mission statement?
To take over the world, one teabag at a time.

2. What is your mission within that?
To be the UK’s leading speciality tea brand, bringing new ideas and concepts to the way we drink tea.

3. How would you define your product/service?
Quality, convenient and fun tea

4. How did the idea for the Teashed come about?
I was on a work placement making lots of cups of tea for a designer. I didn’t drink tea, but he used to send me out to purchase speciality tea. I realised that whilst there are lots of coffee options, there wasn’t fashionable, experimental tea.

5. How long did it take to realise?
It was about 1 year in development.

6. Did it organically come into being or was there a structured process to get from A to B?
I had a structured, researched business plan. I knew what I wanted to achieve from the beginning. My business plan has obviously changed as the business has progressed, many things I included within my business plan initially didn’t work out.

7. When was the moment you actually thought “hang on, there could be a business here!?” When John Lewis got in touch and they wanted to purchase an order. Before that moment, it had all been theoretical.

8. Why do you think the Teashed has been such a success so far?
Low overheads and minimal start-up costs. The business was able to growth as it needed to and wasn’t limited by needing large investment.

9. Do you do any market research before setting up the business to suss out your audience? Yes lots and lots. I needed to really consider who my target market was and prove that just because I thought it was a good idea, that it actually was a good idea.

10. Who is your audience?
25-35 year olds mainly

11. What are your expectations of the company within the next 18months?
Growth, international growth, new products, greater awareness of the brand; I want to rapidly growth the business and I have a plan to do so.

12. What would you do with unlimited resources?
Build a warehouse and pay for more advertising. At this stage of my business, I’m reliant on the advertising channels that I know and I can utilise.

13. What are the short term plans? What are the long term plans?
In the short term, I want to grow the business as large as possible. In the long term, I want to sell the business.

14. Do you have an exit strategy?
Not yet. I know I want to sell but I haven’t decided exactly when that will be. Nor have I developed the business enough to just hand it over, I’m putting structures in place now as I develop it, so it isn’t so owner dependent.

15. If you were starting again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?
I would not tie up so much money in products rather buy less at a more expensive price, rather than lots at a cheaper. I would have been able to sniff out what was selling, instead of ending up with too much of one and others selling out.

16. How much time do you spend working on the business in an average week?
48 hrs, often more.

17. Have you sacrificed anything for its success?
My social life/ being young. I spend every opportunity and moment I can working on the business. This means I don’t have the same free time as my friends as I’m busy building my business. But it is not just my business, my job, it is also my passion and hobby.

18. Have you acquired investment to expand or what is your funding strategy?
Not yet…I’m still considering my options and the best way to expand.

19. Your website is fantastic, were you ever dwarfed by the tech side?
No not really, you just tell the tech guys what they need to do. The key is knowing exactly what you want the website to do and how you’d like it to function. You need to know more than, “I just want a website”. Draw it out and remember once you have people on your site, what do you want them to do when they are there.

20. It is a busy market place with the likes of Charbew, etc…. What did you do to get noticed? Cool packaging, developing a brand, events, not worrying too much about other people and just doing your own thing. I really focused on getting the right branding and utilising the names, making sure that was right. It worked!

21. What is a typical day for you? Where does the Teashed fit in?
Wake up 7am. Check international emails straight away whilst having a cup of tea. Shower, get dressed. Then either spend the day working away at my desk, sorting orders or going to meetings.

22. What is an entrepreneur? How would you describe one?
Someone who isn’t afraid to sacrifice in the short term to gain in the long term. Someone who is not afraid of hard work and someone who is not afraid.

23. Would you define yourself as an entrepreneur? Or how would you define yourself?
No, I would just say I have my own business.

24. Which entrepreneurs/business people do you most admire?
Any woman in business. I love a bit of girl power!

25. Do you think anyone can start up a business?
Yes, if they have the right attributes. It takes a certain type of person with a certain type of skills and the ambition to do it.

26. Do you think some people are just born natural business people? Or do you think it can be learnt from experience/education?
No one is born knowing how to run a business; you learn those skills over time. But if you have inside you what it takes to run a business as that is your personality and that is quite hard to change. Some people are more enterprising than others and see opportunities.

27. You’re from a fashion marketing degree , what extent was your knowledge of business and entrepreneurship before the Teashed?
I have done little businesses since I was 14. Each one felt like a little practice for the Teashed.

28. What area of business do you struggle with the most?
Numbers, but they are a necessity, especially in the beginning, monitoring your business and growing it.

29. What inspires you? Motivates you?
To not have to work for anyone else and doing it on my own terms, my way.

30. Describe yourself in three words?
Business focused, happy and fun

31. What is success?
Being happy within your current position or seeing the path ahead of you as achievable.

32. Low point?
Loosing stockists and managing effective relationship with so many other demands on the business.

33. What excites you?
My vision of Tea

34. What are you most nervous about for the future?
Growing the business and losing control of it.

35. You work alone without a business partner…how do you find this? Do you have a network?
Yes, I pay for all the support I need as and when I need it. This works great for me. I think I would struggle to find anyone who has the same level of commitment and dedication who also shares my vision, so giving away shares wouldn’t work.

36. As a business person, what would you say your ideals are?
Work hard but be nice.

37. Do you think there is a successful pattern to becoming an entrepreneur?
Work hard, day and night. Never give up! Take knock backs as an inevitable learning exercise that is strengthening your business.

38. Before the Teashed, what were your career aspirations? In the long term, what are they now?
To have my own business, I just wasn’t sure what it would look like. In the long term, to carry this on and grow it, then start again.

39. What do you attribute all your personal successes to?
Hard work and family support.

40. What would you say are your strengths and weaknesses?
Weakness – numbers and Excel and strength – product development an design.

41. What set you apart from other students that made you take the entrepreneurial risk?
I only ever wanted to run my own business, so I knew I’d do it, just wasn’t sure when.

Economic success is more than ever dependent on innovation, adapting, beating the competition and standing out from the crowd (Worthington 2005). Moreover, in our economic climate, the fate of our recovery is not only place in the hands of the consumer but also in the hands of businesses. Entrepreneurs can and will help the recovery, especially in the UK (Worthington 2005). The ability to create, innovate, revolutionise and develop are not just ideals, they are starting points and the foundations for most business start-ups. It is a crowded market place, so what makes you and your product different? This process, all involves creativity and innovation. As such, it can be assumed that entrepreneurs need to be creative and innovative in order to start their entrepreneurial journey. But what is creativity? How does one become creative and think of a business idea, in everyday life?

The notion of success and especially, the success of an entrepreneur is often treated like a secret and some unidentified formula. It isn’t. Entrepreneurs are ordinary people. They don’t follow a set of stages in order to be successful; it is hard work, luck and an idea. The idea doesn’t have to be mind-blowing or brilliant, there just has to be an unanswered need and a created solution to fulfil it.

A key barrier, to my business journey so far, is the concept that an entrepreneur has to be innovative and creative. I have often found myself thinking “I can’t start a business because my idea isn’t good enough” or “I’m not really an ideas person”. This partially based on my idealistic view of what an entrepreneur “should” be rather than what they actually are (Burns 2011). My view of someone who is creative was someone who is artistic, has lots of brilliant ideas and makes them into a reality. Someone who literally spends their day tripping over excellent solutions to problems. When I was a child, I really struggled with creativity in the artistic sense. I can’t draw, I’m not musical; I can’t physically create things of beauty, therefore I considered myself uncreative. Consequently, until recently I waited for the idea for a business to come to me; I’ve always felt I’ve had all the business skills to make a successful entrepreneur, but if only I had the idea. Within my early business life, I sat back and watched people thinking “I wish I could have thought of that”. But then I realised, innovation is within everyone’s reach; you just have to try and open your mind to the possibility. Creativity is a challenge you can set for yourself.

As I’ve developed, I’ve realised innovation and creativity in the business sense, spans a range of skills and abilities. Anyone can be creative, including me. When I was a child, my introversion would lead to hours spent inside my own head; considering different possibilities, different scenarios and situations and constantly questioning everything. I was brought up to challenge and to develop my own opinions. As an only child, from an extremely middle class background, I rebelled in order to stand out, be different; I embraced my quirks as my USPs. I became creative in the sense, I saw things differently and I challenged the status quo.

Consequently, I am creative or more correctly, I became creative through increasing my self confidence in my own ideas. I accept I’m not going to have that eureka moment and suddenly feel overwhelmed by divine inspiration; I’m not going to develop a new product. But what I can do is identify problems and gaps in the market; I seek to solve them and fill them. Like my Father, I seek out effective and efficient processes; I look at services and routines and seek to revolutionise them. I’ve developed this skill, by taking time out of my day to think and to discover. As such any budding entrepreneur should set time aside to be creative and to question, a form of business mediation. Not just to reflect, but to consider the “what if?” Of course, this has involved the creation of a lot of TERRIBLE business ideas. My time spent as a business consultant, working with start-ups and idea incubation, taught me that entrepreneurs often have many terrible ideas, before having a good one. I remember working with one gentleman who wanted to create a Russian vodka importing business and had done a lot of research into it. Speaking to him about his idea and critically looking at, he wasn’t deterred. Weeks later, he came back with the skeleton idea for “stuff 4 unit”, which has been a runaway success. Consequently, innovation isn’t just about getting it right; it is about being open to the creative process and willing to try.

Another aspect of my creativity is my self-confidence in my own ideas. This self-confidence, drives me forward to consider and explore, shaping them up into the best idea possible. Many aspects of entrepreneurship are considered to be genetic traits (Burns 2011), things you are simply born with. But, I couldn’t disagree more. The ability to change and develop into who you want to be is a far more important factor. As a child and an early teen, I was the sort who gave up when things got difficult, I panicked and was unable to systematically deconstruct a problem and I was not confident in my own ideas. Today, the reverse is true. I seek out challenges, I love deconstructing things and I’m very confident in my own ability. My mum always taught me as a late teen, that (aside from her), no-one else was going to be my number fan, so I may as well take that role and champion myself into success. If I don’t believe in myself and my own creative ideas, then why on earth would anyone else? As such, creativity is not a personality trait; it is something that is developed.

A crucial aspect of creativity, is what Clutterbuck (2013), expounds as psychological safety. This is a key element to creativity. As an individual, you must feel safe and comfortable to explore ideas and to innovate, without reproach. This process involves thinking of ridiculous and unworkable ideas, having them deconstructed, but working through the process in order to develop the innovation process. This is even more crucial when working with others and bouncing off their creativity. It is a fine line, between critically looking at their ideas and pulling them unconstructively a part. Within any organisation, my academics and my own business, I want an ethos where every single person feels like they can make a different; they are more than just a cog into the corporate machine. Consequently, I want their ideas and input. But I also want them to respect my ideas too.

Zwilling (2013) in his article puts forward several ideas surrounding entrepreneurship and creativity. He discusses corporation’s perceptions of creativity and how as a business, we often perceive how to innovate, which has led to business incentivising creativity, changing the ethos of their company to foster creativity and that creativity is restricted by resources. As such, innovation is labelled as something that needs to be encouraged, needs to have a certain facilitative factor and that not all people can do.

Being an entrepreneur, starts with the ability to create and build on ideas. Instead of focusing on the idealise entrepreneur, we should be looking at how to encourage innovation. However, like with any output, creativity and idea generation is different to everyone; it is a skill that can be developed over time. Business idea generation is daydreaming; dreaming and developing a perception of your idealised world, with something you have created in your mind in it (Zwilling 2013). To boost creativity and innovation, we need to promote more of this day dreaming and considering the “what if?”

There will always be people in the world that can take ideas and make them into a reality. But there may not always be new ideas and innovation. To ensure progress, we should not encourage this elitist view, that innovation and entrepreneurship is for the gifted few. Businesses and success start with idea generation, a process that is accessible and open to all. There isn’t a successful formula to developing a good business idea or a method of promoting idea generation, it all comes from self-discipline. For me that starts with my little note book, a quiet space and a pen. The more I’ve opened myself up to the business idea process and believed in my ability, the list of business ideas I’ve thought of has been remarkable. My notebook is full of terrible ideas, with no practical application or any hope of success, but then once every so often, there develops a good idea, with enterprise mileage (Zwilling 2013).